Saturday, October 31, 2015

It's March in Terlingua and the weather is playing games—icy one day and warmish a few days later. But the weather is not the problem.

The trouble begins with a Photoshopped picture of Deputy Ricos and Sheriff Ben that makes an innocent encounter look like something it's not. Someone is making a problem where none exists. Why?

Mix in the brutal murder of quiet man "everyone likes," a young, green-eyed deputy trainee, a wealthy, mysterious newcomer to Alpine, a prostitute from Mexico, and a local ranch where it appears something "wrong" is happening. Then stir in a cast of characters you will swear you know, hillsides purplish with bluebonnets, and the never-changing/always changing mountains of South Brewster County.

Award-winning author Elizabeth A. Garcia has lived for more than thirty years in the Big Bend country of far west Texas. She has hiked, rafted, explored, and earned a living in this wild desert-mountain land near the Rio Grande, on the border of the United States and Mexico.

It was experiencing the deep canyons, creosote-covered bajadas, and stark, jagged mountains, and the wide-open spaces and dark, starry nights that eventually brought her to writing.

She tells her fans, "I have loved to write since I was a child. As I grew up I never made much time for it. I was busy raising a family and running a company. Once I started writing I realized how many stories have been stockpiled in my brain. I'm getting them out as fast as I can."

Her first novel, "One Bloody Shirt at a Time," won "Best Crime Novel of the Year" from the Texas Association of Authors for 2013. It was her first novel, but not her first written story. For several years Ms. Garcia’s short stories were published by the Big Bend Gazette.

In addition to novels and other stories, Ms. Garcia writes a blog on this site. In the past she has shared her blog with the Alpine Avalanche and later with the Daily Planet. She loves to describe and write about west Texas and continues to live there.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

“Okay . . . . What’s the worst that could happen?”
Johnny flashed me a quick smile and started the car. “The Sweetwater family motto.”

The triumvirate that is Miles Arceneaux — Brent Douglass, John T. Davis, and James R. Dennis — are back with North Beach, the fourth story about the Sweetwater clan in their series of crime novels that have been christened Gulf Coast noir. North Beach is a coming-of-age story of the next generation of Sweetwaters.

With North Beach, set in the summer of 1962, Arceneaux again proves masterful at evoking atmosphere and recreating a particular time and place. We are immersed in that year: the Space Race, Cuban embargo, fallout shelters, the Beach Boys, paranoia, and virulent racism. North Beach proves the truism that the more things change, the more they stay the same, as some of its historical elements remain relevant today.

The Spirit Bird: Stories, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, is Kent Nelson’s latest collection of short fiction. Nelson’s stories feature diverse protagonists — a young single mother, a rabble-rousing Southern lawyer, a restless empty-nester — as well as an unusually vivid sense of place — the chile fields of New Mexico, the resort towns of Colorado, suburban Seattle — that establishes the land as an essential character in the stories. The people in Spirit Bird are trying to break out of their lives, and they share one major trait: dissatisfaction. They’re exploring, pushing boundaries, looking seriously at their own lives and asking, “Really? What now?”

Monday, October 19, 2015

Texans love to eat, and one dish they can’t get enough of is chili—so much so that chili con carne is Texas’s state meal. This seemingly simple staple of Texan identity proves to be anything but, however. Beans or no beans? Beef, pork, or turkey? From a can or from scratch?

Texas Is Chili Country is a brief look at the favored fare—its colorful history, its many incarnations, and the ways it has spread both across the country and the world. The history includes chuckwagon chili, the chili queens of San Antonio, the first attempts at canned chili, the development of chili societies and the subsequent rivalries between them, and the rise of chili cook-offs.

And what would a book about chili be without recipes? There are no-fat recipes, vegan recipes, and recipes from Mexican-American cooks who have adapted this purely American food. Some have been tried, but many are taken on faith. Recipes are included from state celebrities such as Ladybird Johnson, Governor Ma Ferguson, and chili king Frank Tolbert.

Judy Alter retired from Texas Christian University Press after thirty years, twenty of them as director. At the same time she developed her own writing career, focusing primarily on women of the American West. Now she writes fiction and nonfiction for all ages. She lives in Fort Worth.

Sex as a Political Condition: A Border Novel is a raucous, hilarious journey through political dangers that come in all shapes, cup sizes, and sexual identities, a trip into the wild, sometimes outrageous world of the Texas-Mexico border and all geographical and anatomical points south.

Honoré del Castillo runs the family curio shop in the backwater border town of Escandón, Texas, and fears dying in front of his TV like some six-pack José in his barrio. Encouraged by his friend Trotsky, he becomes politically active—smuggling refugees, airlifting guns to Mexican revolutionaries, negotiating with radical Chicana lesbians—but the naked truths he faces are more often naked than true and constantly threaten to unman him. When a convoy loaded with humanitarian aid bound for Nicaragua pulls into Escandón, his journey to becoming a true revolutionary hero begins, first on Escandón’s international bridge and then on the highways of Mexico. But not until both the convoy and Honoré’s mortality and manhood are threatened in Guatemala does he finally confront the complications of his love for his wife and daughter, his political principles, the stench of human fear, and ultimately what it means to be a principled man in a screwed-up world.

A native of El Paso, Carlos Nicolas Flores is a winner of the Chicano/Latino Literary Prize and author of a young adult novel, Our House on Hueco (TTUP, 2006). As a director of the Teatro Chicano de Laredo and a former director of the South Texas Writing Project, he has long been engaged in the promotion of new writers and writing about the Mexican American experience. He teaches English at Laredo Community College in Laredo, Texas.